You can see where federal treasurer Joe Hockey is coming from with his comment about poor people not having cars and so not being affected by the rise in the fuel excise tax, can't you? On the planet he seems to be lost on, the rich are the real oppressed.
The rich are paying too much tax 鈥 or even 鈥渁ll the tax鈥 according to a recent rant in the Australian 鈥 doing all the work, doing the heavy lifting, while the rest of society bludges off them.
Australia鈥檚 richest person, Gina Rinehart, infamously complained that she and her fellow mining magnates were sick of being 鈥渢reated like an ATM鈥.
The rich minority that the treasurer serves are not satisfied with the relentless in so-called egalitarian Australia since the 1990s. They want a bigger share and they want it now.
The rich want to pay less tax even on the fraction of the incomes they declare 鈥 the part that they haven't spirited away to a tax haven or minimised through creative accounting 鈥 and they want to force the rest of us to shoulder a bigger proportion of the tax burden by raising regressive indirect taxes.
But that is not all. You see, from their perspective, the rest of us are effectively not paying any tax because when governments spend money on public education and public hospitals it means us 鈥渂ludgers鈥 are getting our taxes back. Whereas Australian billionaires don't. How unfair is that?
And on top of that, us cheeky 鈥渂ludgers鈥 have the gall to expect democratic rights. We object to the fat brown paper envelopes passed from developer to politician in the front seat of a luxury car. And we object to the corporate lobbyists who seem to run the government.
Their idea of democracy is the rich minority's sacred right to exploit the majority and their right to use the proceeds of this exploitation to buy anything they want, whatever the social or environmental cost.
That is the planet Hockey is lost on.
We don't buy that line. We know that us 鈥渂ludgers鈥 do all the work and the rich live off our backs. And we don't like that.
In the future for which 91自拍论坛 Weekly campaigns, the majority will follow the recent example of those passengers in Perth who, by pushing together, shifted a train to free a passenger trapped on the track. Only on a bigger scale.
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